Talk:Outline of evolution

Some odd little evolution articles
While working on the Outline of evolution, I ran across three stubs that seem kind of awkward.


 * Evolutionary Humanism
 * Evolutionary Principle
 * Evolutionary Synthetic Biology

In their current form, they seem too confusing to add to the body of the outline.

I was wondering if you could make sense of them. The Transhumanist 06:39, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

P.S.: Should they be capitalized like that?


 * Thanks The Transhumanist. Let's start with Evolutionary Humanism. Here is what I found: this refers to 1) the book Evolutionary Humanism by Julian Huxley (1993, Prometheus Books), originally published as Essays of a Humanist (1964, Harper & Row) containing a series of 14 essays about implications of Evolution in terms of an ethical system, 2) a 1949 manuscript entitled “Evolutionary Humanism” (Huxley Papers, Box 67.8); 3) the ethical system expounded by Julian Huxley.  The book should be capitalized, capitalization of the essay depends upon citation style chosen, and the ethical system appears in print both ways, but now with preference not to capitalize.


 * Quote from Huxley, J. 1964. Essays of a Humanist. Harper & Row. (pp 73-74)


 * This new idea-system, whose birth we of the mid-twentieth century are witnessing, I shall simply call Humanism, because it can only be based on our understanding of man and his relations with the rest of his environment. It must be focused on man as an organism, though one with unique properties. It must be organized round facts and ideas of evolution, taking account of the discovery that man is part of a comprehensive evolutionary processes, and cannot avoid playing a decisive role in it.


 * Such an Evolutionary Humanism is necessarily unitary instead of dualistic, affirming the unity of mind and body; universal instead of particularist, affirming the continuity of man and the rest of life, and of life with the rest of universe; naturalistic instead of supernaturalist, affirming the unit of the spiritual and the material; and global instead of divisive, affirming the unity of all mankind. Nihil humanu a me alienum puto is the Humanist's motto. Humanism thinks in terms of directional process instead of in those of static mechanism, in terms of quality and diversity as well as quantity and unity. It will have nothing to do with Absolutes, including absolute truth, absolute morality, absolute perfection...


 * Quote from VB Smocovitis. 1992. Unifying biology: the evolutionary synthesis and evolutionary biology. Journal of the History of Biology 25(1)1-65.


 * Belief in progress - an Enlightenment ideal - had been hard to sustain in the modern world, however, given the bloody after- math of the First World War, the widespread sense of cultural degeneration, and the growing belief in the decline of the West. With the rise of collective movements like communism, fascism, and Nazism, and with the onset of the Great Depression, the drive to ground an ethical system within a progressive, optimistic, and coherent worldview that gave a measure of autonomy to the individual, intensified in the 1930s. For Huxley, a grounding in evolution and the construction of an evolutionary humanism became an imperative for the future of "modern man." From its inception, Huxley's major contribution to the growing literature on evolution, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, was also to act as remedy for the ills of the modern world; avowedly progressive, liberal, and internationalist, it was Huxley's own ideological "testament of youth." (p. 33)


 * Human improvement and autonomy for the individual, were all combined in progressive evolution; and humans had been selected as the unique and "highest" of all organisms on earth.115 Footnote 115: This position is summarized in a manuscript of 1949 entitled “Evolutionary Humanism”, Huxley Papers, Box 67.8. (p. 38)


 * Quote from Madigan. 1999. Evolutionary humanism revisited: the continuing relevance of Julian Huxley. UU Humanist 33(1). (http://huumanists.org/publications/journal/evolutionary-humanism-revisited-continuing-relevance-julian-huxley)


 * "Man is not merely the latest dominant type produced by evolution, but its sole active agent on earth. His destiny is to be responsible for the whole future of the evolutionary process on this planet. . . This is the gist and core of Evolutionary Humanism, the new organization of ideas and potential action now emerging from the present revolution of thought, and destined, I prophesy with confidence, to become the dominant idea-system of the new phase of psychosocial evolution." - Julian Huxley


 * The Evolutionary Humanism article needs improvement and ties to Humanism, Transhumanism, Julian Huxley, and other articles. TheProfessor (talk) 14:13, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Quick explanation of Wikipedia outlines
"Outline" is short for "hierarchical outline". There are two types of outlines: sentence outlines (like those you made in school to plan a paper), and topic outlines (like the topical synopses that professors hand out at the beginning of a college course). Outlines on Wikipedia are primarily topic outlines that serve 2 main purposes: they provide taxonomical classification of subjects showing what topics belong to a subject and how they are related to each other (via their placement in the tree structure), and as subject-based tables of contents linked to topics in the encyclopedia. The hierarchy is maintained through the use of heading levels and indented bullets. See Outlines for a more in-depth explanation. The Transhumanist 00:05, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Generalized Evolution
Where is the topic of "generalized evolution" treated in Wikipedia? By this I mean non-biological evolution such as the evolution of technology, the evolution of knowledge, the evolution of culture, the evolution of governments, etc. While this article is a comprehensive treatment of biological evolution, I would like to see a general introduction to many forms of evolution, including non-biological forms. Thanks! Lbeaumont (talk) 15:25, 28 July 2022 (UTC)